This is another example of how you can work with external partners via a Team Site.

What was the problem?

The company I used to work for was a big fan of conference calls, with or without a Live Meeting. We were facing some issues:

Computer audio did not alway provide good quality, so for calls with 3 or more people it was better to use a “teleconference bridge”: a set of telephone numbers (one per country) with a unique entry code per meeting. Many employees, departments or project teams had their own permanent conference bridge.

Many employees did not use the preferred supplier, often because they did not know we had one or who it was.

It was not very clear how one could obtain a conference bridge.

Additionally, the Telecom department was unaware of the amount of conference bridges in use, and who owned one.

It was time for the Telecom department to give more attention to the request process.

One of the team developed a form in HTML, which automatically added your Employee ID. Neat! After completion the form sent an email to the Telecom department. Telecom then added the Cost Center number, and forwarded the email to the telecom provider. However, the form was on a local server which could not be accessed by everyone, and the emails had to be manually stored by Telecom as individual requests, making it difficult to create overviews. For other locations, there was a manual process where you contacted Telecom and they completed another form.

They asked my team if this process could be improved. And guess what…it could! 🙂

What is the solution?

The HTML-form was replaced by a Custom List in the employee-facing team site for all IT-related questions and information.
Every requester enters their Employee ID manually, but since you make this request only once (this being a permanent conference bridge), this is not perceived as a problem. I modified the “New Entry” URL so upon completion, the requester goes to a page with the next steps of the process. (Read here how to modify the URL, scroll to 2f.)
The Telecom department has set an Alert for Added Items, so they know about all new requests immediately. They enter the Cost Center code to the request and then the form is ready for the telecom provider.
Of course I suggested to set up an Alert for Modified Items for the telecom provider, but after some tests and discussions we decided to send the content of the request as an email to the provider with cc to the requester. (via Corasworks)
By using “Reply All” the telecom provider then sends the conference numbers and other information to both the requester and the Telecom department.

(If you see only a very small picture below, please click it to enlarge. If you know how to fix it, please help!)

The part of the form that employees have to complete.The part that Telecom has to enter.When “Send Email” is “Yes”, Corasworks will send the content of the mail to the provider’s email address. That field does not have a default value to avoid accidental sending of incomplete content.

What are the benefits?

The request form is much easier to find and the process is more transparent; this means more people use the preferred way, saving costs and reducing complexity.

The Telecom department saves time on entering and managing requests.

Telecom department has an overview of the number of bridges in use, and who owns a bridge. This helps them to check if the invoices are correct.

I would have preferred to just give access to the telecom provider, and ask them to add the bridge number to the original request. That would have given the Telecom department even more information without them having to do anything. But well, you can’t always win ;-).

You may also like to read about these examples where we used Team Sites with external partners: